Hacker News Reader

Comment by _kst_ | Hacker News Reader

How are gendered nouns useful? (I'm referring specifically to assigning genders to nouns that refer to objects that aren't intrinsically gendered.)

My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.

To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.

View on HN

I'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful.

Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles:

"I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey"

Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock".

The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).

The case of «das Mädchen» is a mere historical curiosity and doesn't require the memorisation as long as long the person in question is acquainted with basics of the German noun formation, i.e. the "-chen" suffix in German, when added to a noun of masculine or feminine gender, unequivocally results in the "neutralisation" of the noun gender, as well as the "umlautisation" of the stressed vowel of the noun being gender bent, eg. der Hund + "-chen" -> das Hündchen. It's a very simple rule, really.

The thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.

I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).

They are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.

There are other possibilities, but trying to apply logical rules seems pointless; the whole point of language -- what actually makes something a language -- is a completely arbitrary set of rules.

If you do that in German (i.e., "Ich habe eine Tastatur und einen Stein. Sie ist groß und er ist grau."), everyone would start slapping you with a style manual. It's just so unnecessarily contrived.

The major argument for keeping gendered nouns as they are in existing languages is that speakers would be uncomfortable with having their language changed by some standards body.

German isn't my mother tongue, but I think it's a form of diminutive, which often becomes neuter in Germanic languages, as for instance in Dutch.

I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.

What is an animal pronoun?

I translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to.

Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.

I don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.

I was speaking about gendered nouns. They help me resolve pronouns.

Oops I'm sorry about the mansplaining then. Can you give an example? I'm struggling to conceive what you mean.

The nouns for heel, foot, and toe have gender. When I get to the end of a dance step mentioning all 3, and it says "and in the final beat you lift <pronoun>", I use the clue that the pronoun gender should match the noun gender to try to finger out what the antecedent is.

I speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outside of using it for objects for which gender does make sense. But even then saying different word for "walked" depending on whether it was male or female walking doesn't really seem to me much of an advantage. It's just what it is.

It certainly does provide some extra flavors for poets to play with.

It also makes translations to other languages hell, when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes.

> when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes

Ugh, really? How disappointing.

Just to give an example, consider this short poem:

https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ein_Fichtenbaum_steht_einsam

Now try translating this to a language where the tree names are gendered differently, such that e.g. both are male, or both are female.

That is exactly what happened to the Russian translation:

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%...

In Russian, both words are female.

Yeah, Russian is the one I was thinking of.

Although it's actually more complicated, because there's more than one Russian translation, and this problem was tackled in different ways. Lermontov just did a straightforward translation, changing the implied meaning. Tutchev and Fet both changed the pine to another tree such that the word is male: cedar or oak (in the latter case, this also required changing the described environment in which it grows).

Just out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.

Hebrew has the same. Spanish though has it reversed (I didn't mean it among languages I speak since I'm just beginning studying it).

German, too. He might accidentaly be onto something.

And it's the exact opposite in French and presumably all (most?) other Romance languages as well: female table, male government.

If it's your native language, or if you're at a good level of fluency, you don't have to "remember" it, it comes naturally.

I agree it's harder for students though.

What you find hard is mostly a function of what other language or languages you speak. People who speak languages without articles find articles extremely confusing in English and honestly I have a hard time articulating rules for when "the" or "a" would be appropriate.

I think a simple way of putting it (as a native non-bilingual English speaker) would be to think of it as "a" -> non-specific and "the" -> specific.

Example:

A basket is in the car -> some kind of basket of unknown shape or color.

The basket is in the car -> a specific, known basket.

HTH

Having a simple way to put it doesn't mean it's easy to do right.

My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..

Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)

But it is easy once you understand :-)

A == non-specific The == specific

'A dog' could be any old dog.

'The dog' is a specific dog we know.

Thus

A == any The == thing

Perhaps I'm not clear where with this understanding it would trip you up. Can you think of an example?

Can't come up with anything on the spot. But sometimes I see text I wrote and think why I put "a" or "the" instead of vice versa. Sometimes it's just not clear enough wether this item is specific enough or not.

On the other hand, I omit article completely more frequently than using a wrong one. I find I have to consciously think if I should use an article and which article should I use. When I write/talk quickly without double checking, shit happens. Even after using English a lot for 2 decades, articles is just a foreign feature that I have to use consciously.

My wife is Korean and often asks me questions and, while you aren't wrong, the rules are way more complicated than that.

I'm trying to think of an example--do you have one by chance?

Sorry, I'm coming up short. But the theme, I think, is that there are a lot of cases where that sense of specificity isn't quite obvious to a learner, combined with the fact that in some cases the right choice is no article.

We're talking about what makes a good world language though, which implies how hard it is to learn for native speakers is important.

Like tones in Chinese are another example of "easy enough for native speakers, really freaking hard to non-native".

It's a significant bit just like the ones that form the letters: la tour, le tour, entirely different words that have their most famous examples within visual range once a year.

It's really easy, because "keyboard" is "teclado" which ends with o (so it's masculine) while "rock" is "roca" which ends with a (so it's feminine). :)

And there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.

It gets worse in French: un livre (book), une livre (pound, in France equal to 0.5 kg). They're even pronounced the same.

Yes, yes, but this example is so well trod that it immediately popped into your mind, and, what's more, try to think of a sentence where you might honestly be confused about whether "pound" or "book" was meant.

I can certainly imagine a French learner being confused about which gender goes with which noun. Before you say that this is ingrained in French speakers, so are unphonetic English orthography, Chinese tones and ideographs, and other linguistic sticking points ingrained in the native speakers of those languages.

French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".

(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)

Well my whole point is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about whether one language is or isn't appropriate as an international one because the idea that one is just objectively harder than another doesn't really hold.

Le port and la port.

Port is always masculine though, it only means port/harbour.

But it's not that important, gender does add some redundancy and some error-correction to a language. It's not necessary (as shown by English) but it has some use.

I guess he's thinking of "la porte" but the pronunciation isn't the same.

That only happens with a handful of words: those that 1) are feminine and 2) their first syllable begins with an "a" and 3) their first syllable is stressed.

It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.

(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)

If the last letter determines gender what's the point of using "el" or "la" at all?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com